So elegant!

Spotted Eagle Owl?

Such lovely legs and eyes. Horned owls are so awe inspiring. 🥰

They do! It really looks like they're having an important discussion. 😄

I hope so too. I hope more people start to embrace the natural beauty of their homelands and that the rest of us continue to seek out that which is wild and undiscovered for us on a personal level.

Chesapeake is a purple city that has often voted for Democrats, including in four of the past five presidential elections. But no Democrat or independent had filed to run for sheriff in advance of a mid-June deadline, to the immense frustration of local immigrant rights advocates who’d hoped to have an alternative to rally around. “It blows my mind that there’s no opposition,” Maida Dooley, an organizer in the region, told Bolts in early June, calling local party leadership complacent. “Maybe they don’t care,” she said.

I always wonder why I see seats with no candidate in them. I believe in many states there aren't really any prerequisites to being Sherrif, so you could put anyone up for the job. It sounds like this area is open to Dem candidates, so to drop the ball on something important like sheriff right now comes across as very fatalistic on an important issue.

“He was the candidate that was in line with our values,” local party chair David Washington told Bolts.

Which ones?

When it came time for the committee to vote on whether to endorse Rosado, members were asked to hold up a voting card—green for support, red for opposed.

“I saw a sea of green, and myself as the only red,” said D.J. McGuire, a committee member and an advocate for immigrants’ rights. Just two days prior, McGuire had spoken to Chesapeake’s city council to urge it to cut off any local cooperation with ICE.

McGuire, who used to be a Republican but quit the party after Trump emerged as its leader last decade, says he was one of only a few people to press Rosado at the July 10 meeting.

What is up with this place? The Dems are endorsing the Republicans while the recent Republican is trying to stop them. What a bizarro story...

It doesn't seem the MAGAs have publicly been a fan of his, so I wouldn't be totally sure on that.

State Sen. Devlin Robinson, R-Allegheny, referred to Ken Pagurek, a first responder from Pennsylvania Task Force 1, as a "dick," using the slur during a committee meeting on Tuesday.

A video shows Robinson, who serves as the chair of the Labor and Industry Committee, leaning towards Sen. Doug Mastriano, making the disgraceful comment, presumably and wrongfully assuming that the microphone was off. The delegation noted that Mastriano seemed amused by the observation.

Philadelphia House Delegation calls out Sen. Devlin Robinson for disrespecting Pennsylvania firefighter

August 4, 2023

A red Screech is always a crowd pleaser!

Such perfect little owls.

This small owl is so rare that only 4 specimens have been collected from the 1890s to the 1990s.

I'll occasionally mention that owls still have a lot of secrets since there are some we don't know much more about than that they exist.

I enjoy sharing such rare animals since most of us would otherwise never have known they existed. We could lose them forever at any time and may not even know. I wish there were more I could share about them, but that mystery may sometimes be their gift to us, and it's a reminder to appreciate what we still have and still have left to learn.

Here's a short paper on the Flores Scops with some theories about it.

Oh, very cool! I've only done random wines, and I did distilling once. Pomegranate and date sounds really good!

I think you should try it! Most of what I've done has been more for for r/prisonhooch than r/winemaking and it's all been ok to pretty darn good.

Get a hydrometer and some brewery wash and 2 jugs that fit an airlock and stopper. I've done almost all my fermenting in used juice jugs.

I never found it harder than making bread. There's no kneading, but I usually make a bigger mess transferring liquids, so it is messier. It's fun though, and very little hands on time. Make small batches and there's very little financial risk. Once you get the hang of it, then invest in some carboys and whatever other fancy things you desire.

If your worried about growing something unintended, do a few with purchased yeast so you can learn how the normal year reaction and the byproduct looks and smells at various stages so when you "go wild" you know what's normal. It does sometimes burp some foul gas depending on the strain of yeast. I forget what gas it is, but it's normal, some yeasts just have stinker gas. 😁

I don't know if I'd say "bad" but certainly different.

Today we have catalogs of different strains of yeast one can order to ferment beverages. Prior to that, people would just be leaving the liquid open to the air to pick up wild yeasts. Whether that led to something good or bad was a bit up to chance.

Same with the resulting ABV. Different yeasts will thrive to different alcohol levels. My first experiment making wine was with bread yeast I had on hand. It worked, and the wine was a hit with all who sampled it, but it was lower in alcohol and higher in residual sugar because that yeast has been cultivated for bread, not alcohol. The same starting juice with a modern dry red wine yeast results in just that.

Also some wines like sherry are made by doing things like heat cycling and introducing oxygen that are "bad" for typical wines.

During different periods, sweet wine was in fashion, so we can't really use that as a basis of quality, it's just the choice of the winemaker.

Wine was also made out of a wider variety of ingredients than with most commercial stuff today, so there are probably awesome herbal infused drinks lost to time or things that are still just regional items that most of us have never heard of.

As a big part of culture, our beverages will continue to evolve, and while some may prefer more of what we consider classic wines now may not hold true in the future. What we have today is just built in centuries of experimentation, which for me, is the fun and rewarding part of brewing.